Glorious fall weather and a striking coastal setting added to participants' enjoyment of a daylong field trip to exposures of submarine-canyon fill in Point Lobos State Reserve, south of Carmel, California. The October 7 field trip was organized by the Pacific Section of SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology) and led by Ed Clifton, a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Emeritus scientist with the USGS Western Coastal and Marine Geology team. Trip leader Clifton and coleader Larry Rychner, retired from Chevron Production, both volunteer as docents at Point Lobos State Reserve, renowned for its scenic beauty and rich diversity of plants and wildlife (see URL http://pt-lobos.parks.state.ca.us/).

Approximately 70 field-trip participants spent the day walking through the reserve and learning about sandstone and conglomerate outcrops of the Carmelo Formation, interpreted as Paleogene submarine-canyon-fill deposits resting unconformably on Cretaceous granodiorite of the Salinia terrane. Clifton summarized his 42 years of work on the Carmelo Formation, pointing out features of these spectacular, complex deposits that reveal new insights into physical processes of submarine gravity flows and the geometry of potential hydrocarbon-reservoir facies. Clifton's guidebook to the geology of the Point Lobos State Reserve was newly published for this field trip and is available through the Pacific Section of SEPM as Book 105.

The Point Lobos field trip was one of two field trips offered this fall by the Pacific Section of SEPM in the San Francisco Bay area; the other, held October 6, examined the stratigraphy and depositional environments of rocks exposed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California. For short descriptions of both trips, visit URL http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/pacsepm/SEPMfieldtrips.htm.

Coastal and marine scientists are encouraged to join and participate in the Pacific Section of SEPM, which offers great-value membership rates ($7.50 per year, or $20 for 3 years). For more details, visit the organization's Web site at URL http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/pacsepm/.